126 
THE CONDOR 
| Vol. VII 
tographer approached her nest, she would dart at him. She swooped at his head 
with a loud bark, something like a watch-dog; at six or eight feet distant, she 
dropped her legs and took him a sharp clip with her feet. Twice she knocked 
the hat from the intruder’s head. We tried several times to get her picture but 
were only partially successful. It was not a highly pleasing experiment to try on 
the edge of a ledge that broke so abruptly off. 
I have often seen the western gull act in ways that speak well for his sagac- 
ity. On several occasions. 1 watched him open clams and mussels at the seashore. 
His bill is unfitted for crushing the hard shell. 1 saw one gull grasp a clam in his 
bill, rise to a height of thirty feet and drop it to the hard sand and gravel below. 
He followed it up closely, but it didn’t break. He repeated the same performance 
over fifteen times before he was successful. 
Our camp was partly protected from above by the over-hanging rock, which 
we thought would be fortunate in case of a storm. As we discovered later, this 
ledge was rather a dangerous protection, because disintegration was constantly 
going on. The movements of the birds on the cliff above often dislodged pieces of 
the basaltic structure. When we were in the midst of a meal, or sitting enjoying 
GULLS IN FLIGHT 
a few minutes of rest, we were often startled by an avalanche of pebbles. Drop- 
ping everything, we would jump for the safer retreats under the ledge, until the 
rain of stones, often as large as a good sized egg, had ceased. 
The roof of the rock is covered from one to three feet with a loose coating of 
friable earth, composed of rotten rock and the guano of countless generations of 
seafowl. From this sprouts a luxuriant growth of grass and weeds; rich patches 
of chick-weed, clover, and other varieties. The whole surface is so perforated with 
the burrows of puffins and petrels, that one cannot walk any distance without 
sinking into a nest. The tufted puffins dig in from two to four feet, and a bur- 
row will often have two or three openings. The petrel most always uses the door 
of a puffin’s nest and digs himself a kind of side bedroom off the main corridor. It 
is not unusual to find one or two puffins along the main hall-way and a couple of 
petrels lodged in the attic, as it were. 
The tufted puffin always impresses me as being more of a beast than a bird. 
Its huge, strikingly-colored bill, long, yellow curls and roll-shaped body give it 
the queer appearance. One look at that bill shows that according to Lamarck’s 
